63 pages • 2 hours read
Wayson ChoyThe Jade Peony
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1995A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 1Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1: “Jook-Liang, Only Sister”
Chapter 1 Summary
Jook-Liang narrates this entire part in hindsight. The events of this chapter take place in 1933, when Jook-Liang is 5 years old. She states that at the time, she “only had two brothers to worry about. Kiam and Jung were then ten and seven years old. Sekky was not yet born, though he was on his way” (13). She states that her Grandmother, whom she calls Poh-Poh, was actively praying for a boy at the family’s Tong Association Temple during this time. Jook-Liang also states that Mrs. Lim, their neighbor, would later recall that Jook-Liang expressed hope for another girl.
Jook-Liang reveals that she calls her actual, biological mother “Stepmother,” due to custom. Stepmother was 7 years old in war-ravaged China when robbers killed most of her family. After being taken to a Mission House, then reclaimed by the village clan, she was ultimately sold into Jook-Liang’s father’s Canton merchant family. They fed and housed her while grooming her to be a proper wife and caretaker for Jook-Liang’s grandmother, who was living with Jook-Liang’s father in Canada. When the time was right, Stepmother was sent to Canada on a steamship. Although she had been groomed, she nonetheless arrived as an uneducated woman with a “village dialect” (13). At 20, she was more than a decade younger than Jook-Liang’s father. Her role quickly became emotional, rather than solely practical, and she birthed Jook-Liang a few years later. Jook-Liang inherited her “delicate mouth” and “high forehead” from her mother, and also specifies that her mother was a “slim woman with […] fine features and genteel posture” (13).
Poh-Poh is one of a dwindling number of elder women in Vancouver, and relishes her role as “the arbitrator of the old ways” (14). Accordingly, Poh-Poh is the one who dictated that Jook-Liang’s mother be known as “Stepmother” because Kiam was “the First Son of Father’s First Wife who had died mysteriously in China,” while “Jung, the Second Son, had been adopted” into the family (14).
Jook-Liang then switches to narrating an unfolding scene. As Jook-Liang sits with her mother, who is helping her dress her doll, Jook-Liang touches her mother’s pregnant belly. Her brothers are playing a Hong Kong-manufactured game called THE ENEMIES OF FREE CHINA. Their father is doing brush-writing in the adjacent room, from which he can see the whole kitchen. Poh-Poh sits at the kitchen table, taking pleasure from the boys’ game.
A family relation named Third Uncle Lew gave Kiam the ENEMIES OF FREE CHINA game as a birthday present. The goal of the game is to use the swords to hit the heads of figurines, which then land on a numbered mat. The Chinese army moves ahead by the number upon which the head falls. The enemies of China include a Warlord, a Communist, and a Japanese soldier: “All three [have] ugly yellow faces, squashed noses and impossible buck teeth” (20). The game is a propaganda tool designed to raise money for China.
Poh-Poh was owned by a family named the Chins, who were refugees from Manchuria that were forced to flee after Japanese forces took the territory. Poh-Poh, a servant, was often whipped mercilessly. Jook-Liang recalls that Poh-Poh would often abruptly end her recollections with the phrase “Too much bad memory” (15). Now, though, Poh-Poh commands her grandsons to “kill more” during their game (15).
Jook-Liang tells us that Poh-Poh has a set of dialects she has collected during the course of her long life, and which she uses in specific ways with particular people. With Jook-Liang and Jung, Poh-Poh uses Sze-yup, or her Four Country village dialect. With Kiam, she uses Cantonese and some Mandarin, which Kiam is currently studying. With Stepmother, Poh-Poh uses a terse version of her village dialect, one that “many adults [use] when they think you might be the village fool, too worthless or too young, or not from their district” (16).
Poh-Poh says that Wong Bak is coming for dinner, which is her signal to Stepmother to begin cooking. Wong Bak is an “Old China friend” of Poh-Poh’s, and they are both in their seventies (16). He was connected to the family by their Tong Association, because he had once lived in the same village as Poh-Poh.
Jook-Liang states that most Chinatown people were from villages within the southern Kwangtung province, which was ravaged by drought and famine. All able-bodied men therefore left their villages when labor contract brokers in Canada put out a call for railroad workers in the 1880s. They were also enticed by rumors of gold. Thousands emigrated, until 1923, when Canada passed the Chinese Exclusion Act and “shut down all ordinary bachelor-man traffic between Canada and China, shut off any women from arriving, and divided families” (17). Impoverished bachelor-men were isolated in Gold Mountain, only able to send a few dollars back to China every month, and never able to afford passage back home. Therefore, many of them lost their minds and committed suicide. Jook-Liang intimates that in Chinatown, July 1st—the holiday that marks Canada’s founding—is known as the Day of Shame. Some, like Old Wong, still hope to return to China. But with the escalating war with the Japanese, feuding between the Communists and the Nationalists, and more famine, Poh-Poh only wants her bones sent back. Jook-Liang also intimates that Old China bachelor-men—unemployed, destitute, and “deserted by the railroad companies and betrayed by the many labor contractors who had gone back to China,” are still dying in droves in her community (17). In this context, the family is asked to help Wong Bak by offering occasional company and meals.
Father, who has splurged on supplies for this special dinner, is also concerned about his children meeting the elder for the first time. Father is preoccupied by the necessity of every respect being given to Wong Bak, especially because Wong Bak is personally acquainted with Poh-Poh, who must not lose face: all gestures of hospitality must be offered, and all of the children must demonstrate proper “respect and honor for the old ways” (18).
Father takes the children aside and warns them that Wong Bak may have a very strange appearance that might scare the young and female Jook-Liang, in particular. He says that the children must use the formal term Sin-saang (Venerable Sir) for Wong Bak. He specifies that they must demonstrate proper respect by pretending everything is normal, even if they find Wong Bak’s appearance peculiar. Specifically, he warns the children not to gawk at Wong Bak’s face, as the old man has had a hard life. Kiam replies that they know how to behave as Jung jabs his sword, still playing the game.
Jook-Liang bears the accusations of Jung, who insists that she will disobey instructions and stare at Wong Bak’s face. She also reveals that she prefers the game that her brothers are currently playing to playing Tarzan, in which she must be the passive and useless Jane.
Poh-Poh then tells Jook-Liang an elaborate story about the Monkey King, who was sent on a journey by the Buddha. In the story, the Monkey King disguises himself as an errant boatman. He and his friend, Pig, ride on the back of an enormous sea turtle in order to evade the fire-breathing River Dragon.
Then, there is a thunderous knocking on the front door. Poh-Poh calls the noise “ghost thunder,” and Jook-Liang notes that all of Poh-Poh’s stories are rapturous and elaborate, involving (sometimes indistinguishable) demons bent on murderous destruction, or spirits meaning to test one’s courage. When Jook-Liang makes out Wong Bak’s shadow on the porch, she wonders whether he is a demon or a spirit.
Jook-Liang’s father ushers Wong Bak into the home. Jook-Liang is shocked by the old man’s appearance, which she likens to a mountain. He uses two walking sticks and has a humpback. His face remains obscured for a long time because his crooked gait hides it. Jung searches for it conspicuously, against the previous commands of Father.
Father uses a formal question and tone to ask Wong Bak if he has had his rice yet. When Wong Bak straightens himself up to answer, he reveals his face, which is like none other that Jook-Liang has ever seen: it is that of “a wide-eyed, wet-nosed creature” (23). She imagines that it is like Cheetah, Tarzan’s pet chimpanzee, and hears the ghost thunder to which Poh-Poh has previously referred when she looks upon it. She becomes convinced that he is the Monkey King of her grandmother’s stories, “disguised as an old man bent over two canes” (23). Jook-Liang’s brothers greet Wong Bak with appropriate formalness, and when Wong Bak blows his nose, Jook-Liang believes that he is covertly signaling to Pig, whom she is convinced must be outside.
While Poh-Poh bangs on tableware in the kitchen to remind the family to politely summon her, Wong Bak fixes his eyes upon Jook-Liang. He declares that she must be “the pr-pretty one” (25). Taking his stutter as a signal that no child should fear him, and still convinced that he is the Monkey King, she runs to him and enfolds her head into his body. He embraces her back and thereby restores the atmosphere to evenness.
As the scent of the food fills the air, Poh-Poh emerges from the kitchen. She greets Wong Bak, calling him by his birth-name, Wong Kimlein. When they reach the table, Jook-Liang scrambles to get the seat next to Wong Bak. She notices that Poh-Poh speaks to him in a “pitched and strange” dialect, which she immediately labels Monkey talk (26). Poh-Poh speaks excitedly and expansively to Wong Bak throughout the dinner. They sometimes laugh, but predominantly sigh with an old and enduring kind of sadness. Jook-Liang cycles through all of the disguises that Poh-Poh has described the Monkey King as taking on—mundane human disguises that help him move through the world of ordinary people. Poh-Poh has even asserted that the chimpanzee Cheetah is one of the Monkey King’s disguises. Jook-Liang also remembers that the Monkey King can be tricked with food, especially ripe peaches. As Kiam chastises Jook-Liang, telling her he’s human, Jook-Liang recalls that Kiam has always maintained that Poh-Poh’s stories are fiction, just like the Bible stories they learn in Sunday School.
Nonetheless, Jook-Liang becomes absolutely convinced that Wong Bak is wearing a mask that disguises his true Monkey King identity. She therefore stands up on her chair and grabs Wong Bak’s ear. “You Tarzan monkey…You Cheetah,” she says to him (28). Stepmother is aghast and Poh-Poh commands her to let him go, but Wong Bak, laughing, tells Poh-Poh to let Jook-Liang pull on his face. She tells Poh-Poh that the girl has Poh-Poh’s “lao foo spirit,” and that she is “tiger-willed” (28). Jook-Liang looks deeply into the old man’s eyes and runs her hands all over his face and head, looking for an incriminating string that would reveal his disguise, but finds nothing. She then pronounces that he is “A for-real Monkey Man” (28). He then asks the girl if she will call him “Wong Suk.” Suk is the word used for a man Father’s age, or much younger, and it is more informal than Sin-saang. Wong Bak asserts that he likes the title better, as it makes him feel younger than the name Wong Bak, which means Old Wong. Jook-Liang takes this request as the old man revealing his secret magic name, which is a blessing. He then addresses her in the family dialect, asking her if she is afraid of him, the Monkey Man. Jook-Liang shakes her head no. The two embrace each other. Wong Bak announces to the family that the girl is not afraid of him.
Poh-Poh attempts to wrest Jook-Liang away, telling her not to be foolish. Jook-Liang, however, wants to declare that the old man is her very own. He eventually lets the girl go, and everyone resumes eating dinner. Poh-Poh and Wong Bak no longer speak to each other in their shared dialect—the servant dialect of Old China—but their exclusive and mysterious intimacy remains palpable.
Chapter 2 Summary
This chapter documents one particular day in which Jook-Liang (referred to by her shortened name Liang, going forward) awaits the arrival of Wong Bak, whom she now stably refers to as Wong Suk. Approximately three years have passed since the previous chapter, and Liang now has a 3-year-old younger brother, with whom her mother was pregnant in the previous chapter. The brother is named Sek-Lung, or Sekky. Poh-Poh blatantly favors the male child. Liang is now 9.
Sekky is suffering from a mysterious illness that Liang hopes is not TB, as such a diagnosis would earn the family a sign reading “CONDEMNED” on the front yard and thereby transform them into pariahs. However, the doctor has continually withheld a diagnosis of TB, and no other family members have fallen ill. Poh-Poh attends to Sekky by slipping pink pellets given to her by her Chinese herbalist into his chicken broth.
While Poh-Poh calls Liang mo yung—useless—Jook-Liang prepares to deliver a tap-dancing performance to Wong Suk. She also advises Liang that it is not beneficial to be born a girl. And, although Poh-Poh is respectfully referred to as The Old One, Jook-Liang consoles herself against her grandmother’s comments by reminding herself that she, too, was once a girl.
Jook-Liang tells us that the previous week, Wong Suk had spent a significant amount of money to buy her crimson satin ribbon. Poh-Poh now adroitly maneuvers the ribbon into an intricate bow that transforms Liang’s second-hand tap shoes into works of art. (Liang had to spend days cajoling and begging Poh-Poh to do so.) Jook-Liang also reveals that Poh-Poh has such skills because, as a “house-daughter” to a refugee Shanghai family in Old China, she was brutally forced to “learn […] how to knot pom-pom flowers and how to hand-weave sun-dried, skin cutting grass stalks into flat ‘eternal love’ patterns so seamless that each design revealed neither a beginning nor an end” (34). Jook-Liang wants to ask her grandmother to teach her how to do these things, but holds back because Poh-Poh did try to teach her once, when Liang was 6 years old. However, Poh-Poh grew frustrated by Liang’s lack of urgency and fear and raised her hand to strike the child before announcing that she would no longer teach her.
Liang reveals that Poh-Poh would receive merciless beatings at the hands of the First Concubine of the family to which she was tethered through service, and that she was told to consider these beatings a blessing, relative to the brutal, even crippling beatings that field servants endured.
Liang laments the fact that Poh-Poh regards her, at 9 years old, as hopelessly ignorant, untrainable, and mo yung (useless). She feels embittered by the fact that Poh-Poh keeps all of her womanly skills “away from [Liang]” while simultaneously teaching “Baby Brother some juggling, telling him paperfolding stories, even [showing] him how to make simple toys, like paper cranes, toss rings—or windchimes” (35).
Liang feels sharp and grown-up in her shoes, whose ribbons have been immaculately tied by her grandmother, and her curled, Shirley-Temple-style hair. While she attempts to keep a quiet and humble demeanor so as not to confirm her grandmother’s doubts and suspicions about her, the term mo yung stings her. She insists that she is not useless, even though she is a girl. She continues to bicker with her grandmother while preening. And she wonders why Wong Suk is so late.
Liang uses the wooden street-facing front porch as the stage for the performances she puts on for Wong Suk. She wears Stepmother’s old dresses and costume jewelry to mimic “the Chinese Opera heroines: the warrior-woman, the deserted wife, the helpless princess” (38). She has also recently begun to imitate Shirley Temple. She makes her sets out of household items: bedsheets for a sky backdrop, ropes for rivers, and crates for mountains. She does it all for her beloved Wong Suk, whom others see as an ugly old man, while he remains a “bandit-prince in disguise” in her eyes (39).
Liang muses about the details of her visits from Wong Suk: Typically, he will first delight her with his violent and ghostly stories. Then, he will indulge her by watching her perform. Next, they will walk down Pender Street for Chinese pastry and soup, or catch a matinee. Liang loves to go to the Odeon Theater because of its ornate décor and the circus-like performances that it hosts in between shows. Wong Suk has told her that she is his little girl and his family—and Liang relishes their adopted relationship, knowing that he would be merely one of many discarded old men and she a “useless girl-child,” if it weren’t for each other (39).
Liang continues yearning for Wong Suk. While Poh-Poh wants Wong Suk to be pleased with Liang, she also chastises Liang (to bring her down a few pegs) because she understands “the appeal and danger of dreams” (39). In a mixture of Chinese dialects, English, and pidgin, she calls Liang stupid for wanting to dance like Shirley Temple, and tells her that if she were in China, her feet would be bound and she would unable to dance. Liang dances nonetheless, and in so doing, creates a world in which she is adored and embraced.
Liang does not want to hear her grandmother’s ceaseless refrain about how her grandmother was deemed too ugly to be a wife and was therefore sold as a servant into a wealthy home, where her own feet were bound. When Poh-Poh was born, the midwife announced that she was too ugly—and her father, a farmer who had wanted a son, abandoned his family forever. Poh-Poh had been born prematurely, with a misshapen skull, “pads of skin over her face, and a fold of hair around her neck” (40). Although her mother viewed her as cursed for being both a girl and ugly, she stubbornly nursed her, and Poh-Poh eventually grew up to mother Liang’s father. Her facial and skull deformities cleared, her hair grew in, and she became quite a pretty woman in her old age.
Poh-Poh tends to Sekky and teases Wong Suk by calling him Mau-lauh Bak—Monkey Man Bak. Liang tells her not to call him that. Jook-Liang reflects on her grandmother’s tragic life: she was doomed by the initial pronouncement that she was ugly, even if she soon grew into a fine-looking child. Liang finds solace in the fact that even if she, like her grandmother, is told that she is a useless girl, Wong Suk will never leave her. He will always love her. She prays that it won’t rain, so she can stage a performance for him.
Clouds gather above the house, though sun pours in through the windows. Liang’s heart fills with expectation, and she looks at her reflection, hoping to see Shirley Temple there. She finds herself lacking. However, she continues to dance.
Chapter 3 Summary
Liang is still waiting for Wong Suk to arrive. In hindsight, she realizes that the faded raspberry-colored stain on her taffeta dress should have served as a foreboding sign. She intimates that others make fun of her and Wong Suk when they see the two walking down the street, taunting them as “Beauty and the beast” (45). However, she pays them no mind, as she is always extremely happy and fulfilled with her bandit-prince.
Liang also recounts the way that people behave during the newsreel at the movies. China is at war with Japan, and Wong Suk claps when Chiang Kai-Shek appears on the screen. Everyone hisses at the appearance of the Japanese, white people cheer when they see President Roosevelt, and children cheer for Mighty Mouse.
No one is home except Poh-Poh, Sekky, and Liang. Liang realizes that she should have seen that fact as another sign. She fantasizes about being friends with Shirley Temple while tap-stepping and waiting for Wong Suk.
Poh-Poh reminds Liang that Wong Suk is attending to some papers that day. Liang remembers that, last week, Wong Suk and her father were sorting through Wong Suk’s assorted identity papers, which have conflicting information about his birthdate. They were careful to select papers whose dates matched. Wong Suk had wanted Liang’s father to tell her something, but he did not.
Liang also tells the story of Boss Man Johnson. Wong Suk worked under Johnson on building the last portions of the Canadian Pacific Railroad. One day, Johnson shared a bottle of whisky with a new drinking partner, who ended up beating and robbing him, then leaving him semi-conscious on the freezing cold train tracks. Wong Suk discovered him and revived him, wrapping him in a Hudson’s Bay blanket. Wong Suk never accepted any gifts that Johnson offered to him in repayment for his quick thinking and kindness. On his deathbed, Johnson remembered Wong Suk’s act of bravery and heroism, and told the story to his son, Roy Johnson. Roy Johnson then sent Wong Suk his own new cloak: “a blanket…to replace the one you wrapped around my father,” he wrote in a letter to Wong Suk (55). Roy also enclosed an American gold coin engraved with an eagle. Wong Suk relishes telling this tale, and the cloak is his elegant trademark.
Liang recalls that last week her father gave Wong Suk $50 in a lucky red envelope. He instructed Wong Suk to take Liang out with some of the money, and to keep the rest. When Liang and Wong Suk went out, others stared and pointed at them, which Liang feels she should also have seen as a sign. She then reveals that she has overheard women gossiping about Wong Suk’s penis and his monkey face over mahjong. She also intimates that he is only one of many disfigured Chinese men who roam Chinatown.
It is now noon, and Wong Suk is more than an hour late. Liang cannot wait to execute her day’s plan, regardless of this mysterious errand involving Wong Suk’s paper. She envisions him fulfilling his promise to admire her shoes, which are festooned in the red ribbons he gifted her. She then plans on performing her new Shortnin’ Bread tap-dance steps for him, and then going to see a movie and the newsreels at the Lux.
Finally, Wong Suk appears at the house on his two canes. He carefully explains to Liang that he is going back to China later that very day on a steamship. He will be going back with a shipment of the bones of Chinese people who died working in Gold Mountain.
Liang is thrust into shock and denial as the day inexorably unfolds in front of her. She is eventually pushed into a taxi with Kiam, Jung, her father, Stepmother, and Wong Suk, which will bear them to the dock, where they will say farewell to Wong Suk. Wordlessly, her grandmother watches them depart while holding Sekky in her arms.
On the dock, they must leave Wong Suk at the Customs entrance. Liang’s father lifts her up, so she can give Wong Suk a kiss on the cheek. Wong Suk says nothing, and rests his hand on the girl’s curly hair for just a moment, before they are pushed and jostled by the crowd and he must be on his way. Father lifts Liang higher and higher so that she can see Wong Suk’s retreating figure. She watches him board The Empress of Russia and he is gone.
As she and her family watch the ship sail away, Jook-Liang imagines that she is standing on the ship’s deck with Wong Suk. She remembers that he once asked her, “What wealth should a bandit-prince give his princess?” (67). At the time, her greedy answer was “everything.” She laments that she was too young to know that “bones must come to rest where they most belong” (68).
Part 1 Analysis
There are several key ways in which the narrative style of Part 1 approximates stream-of-consciousness. For one, the impressions and images that Liang’s voice generates feel very spontaneous, and sometimes chaotic, as she tumbles in and out of the present and the past, and between myth and reality. Both her recollections of factual events, as well as the emotionally-resonant and imagery-laden depictions of the mythical characters and storylines, burst forth with an immediacy and intensity that typifies stream-of-consciousness. In addition, Liang’s narrative voice has a habit of rapidly switching between several different registers. Firstly, a narration of the chronological events in her memory (namely, the formation and dissolution of her friendship with Wong Suk, which forms Part 1’s core plot) intermingles with sudden recitations of Chinatown lore and family history. Her narrative voice is also equally prone to go into a reverie that reveals sudden and sharp insights about Poh-Poh’s life, and just as equally prone to treating flesh-and-blood people (namely, Wong Suk) as if they are mythological creatures. This rapid switching between registers and images often creates a sense of disorientation, which is a hallmark of stream-of-consciousness narration.
Together, the aforementioned narrative aspects create a kind of record of the character of Liang’s consciousness. The chaotic and sometimes seemingly-random jumps between registers and temporalities reflect her experience as a first-generation Chinese-Canadian child. They reflect the ways that she is caught between the ways and ancestral mythologies of Old China (personified by Poh-Poh) and the enticing charms of the Western World (which is most resonantly typified by the figure of Shirley Temple, whom Liang hungers to become).
Upon closer inspection, though, a pattern reveals itself in the writing that moves it away from classic stream-of-consciousness, which, in its classic form, follows no real premeditated structure. The fact that we can see Liang’s narrative voice as a corollary to her identity and position (both within her family and within Canadian and Chinese culture at-large) reveals the inner mechanics of Choy’s storytelling. So, while we experience the breathlessness and delicate chaos of Liang’s consciousness, we also understand the text as structured and premeditated. In addition, the points of the narrative at which Liang clearly indicates that she is telling her story from a place of hindsight, and as a grown woman, directly contravene the more spontaneous aspects of the narrative that evoke stream of consciousness, and also highlight the ultimately organized and constructed nature of the text.
The characters of Poh-Poh and Wong Suk literally embody the unique blend of fantastical myth and inexorable humanity that Choy’s narrative style maintains through this section of the book. Wong Bak and Poh-Poh bridge the gap between the surreal and the terrestrial. On the one hand, Poh-Poh bursts with finely-wrought parables that include raging demons and mischievous magicians, and which deeply impact Liang’s perceptions of reality and moral truth. Poh-Poh seems almost otherworldly, with her facility in numerous esoteric dialects and her clear emergence from an entirely different world from that which the family has come to occupy during Liang’s childhood. On the other hand, Poh-Poh reveals her human frailty and shortcomings through her gender-based bias against Liang. Her open and constant insults stating that Liang is particularly useless and bumbling because she is a girl, along with her flagrant favoring of Sekky, lay bare her all-too-human flaws. Wong Suk, for his part, is both Liang’s mythical and magical Monkey Prince and a man broken and battered by poverty, hard labor, isolation, and racism. For all of their Old-China esoterics and magic, these two characters cannot escape both their resolute humanity and the decidedly cruel and un-magical aspects of their social, economic, cultural, and geographic positions.
